Driving
home Sunday night, I heard the voice of urgency through the radio, issuing an
evacuation order for low-lying areas below Oroville Dam. Earlier that day, I’d heard the opposite
news: that no danger was present despite
spillway problems and full-to-overflowing levels of the reservoir. The change in the news put me into emergency
mode.
In my early thirties, while at
Berkeley, I’d studied dam failures and a phenomenon called “reservoir-induced
seismicity” for a class on earthquakes I was taking as part of my preparation
for environmental planning. An earlier
class, “Hydrology for Planners” taught by a nationally-famous hydraulic engineer,
Luna Leopold (one of two sons of environmentalist Aldo Leopold who both taught
on that campus,) had focused on floods and flooding, particularly with respect
to urban areas. Reservoirs,
unfortunately, are where those two subjects sometimes converge.
Eight years after Oroville Dam was
completed, the city of Oroville (located just downstream from the dam)
experienced a 5.7 magnitude earthquake embedded in a series of foreshocks and
aftershocks that were caused by the reservoir itself – specifically, the rapid
drawdown and refilling of the reservoir. The damage from the earthquake, which involved
no flooding because the new dam remained intact, was estimated at $3 million
dollars. Had the dam failed as a result
of those earthquakes, the costs would have been astronomically higher.
As I write this, the failures on
both the main and emergency spillways, which prompted the evacuation of almost
190,000 people, are being managed. Even
if they succeed in lowering the reservoir in time for the next downpour, however,
the costs of the evacuation to those shuttled away from homes, jobs, farm
animals and implements could easily top the $3 million suffered in 1975, even
when number is recalculated for inflation.
Add the costs to the state and multiple counties for providing emergency
services, then the costs of repairing the dam’s spillways, and what we have is
a portrait of one of the things that’s wrong with building large
reservoirs: the total costs of these
projects are never computed in the cost-benefit studies. They aren’t calculable.
Oroville is an interesting town,
especially considering that the majority of its vast water resources is shipped
well beyond the lands surrounding it.
With a population of 16,000 it has much in common with the towns in our
readership area. The first olive
processing plant was built there; the original “Mother Orange Tree” still
resides there. Located at the last spot
on the Feather River where boats can go, it began as a service center for gold
miners in the foothills when the state was still in diapers, then developed
small-scale farms. It has a small
downtown with half-empty brick buildings like most of our towns have, and
serious challenges for survival.
Unlike Lindsay, however, it has many
people working to preserve its historic quality and stimulate its economic
development in sustainable ways. My
friend and attorney Richard Harriman has been following and assisting in these
folks’ progress, and has brought me stories of hope even as we ponder how to
help something similar come into being here.
So I’m praying for the folks of
Oroville right now, and the future of their downtown restoration. The Feather River would like to go right
through those streets and buildings right now and carry the fruit of many peoples’
efforts all the way to the Sutter By-Pass just south of Nicolaus. Pray that the Department of Water Resources
can stay on top of water under the tremendous force of gravity. Pray that weighty water doesn’t trigger
another earthquake.
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Trudy
Wischemann is an environmental planner who writes. You can send her your favorite flood stories
c/o P.O. Box 1374 or leave a
comment below.
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